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Online Zoom Workshop for everybody interested in psychological change
Sat & Sun, 22 & 23 February 2025, 15.00 – 21.00 EET
in English (with expert simultaneous Greek translation)
More Info & Booking: website: https://upliftingevent.com/
More info for participants from Greece: Dimitris Tzachanis - info@gestaltsynthesis.gr
More info for participants from UK, US and elsewhere: Michael Soth
About therapy in the 'here & now'
50 years ago, when Fritz Perls demonstrated Gestalt therapy for the first time on television, many people were gripped and inspired by the immediacy, vibrancy and powerful impact of working in the 'here & now'. The idea of attending to the 'phenomenology of the present moment' - rather than focusing on the past, the history of the biography, the roots of adult experience in childhood development - profoundly changed the way we thought about what was possible in therapy, and how long it had to take.
But now, 50 years later, for many people interested in self-development and therapy, 'being here and now' has become an 'old' idea, no longer fashionable - apparently over the last few decades the idea has lost its revolutionary and revelatory appeal. Of course, to the eternal now, our silly fashions and disenchantments are of no concern - the present moment just continues, undisturbed by our lack of appreciation of it. Of course it's an 'old' idea, thousands of years old. But apparently, humanity still hasn't got the point, after all this time - how much continuous present has to pass before we wake up and get the message?
Humanity - and much of the therapeutic field - seems to be as busy as ever repeating and regurgitating the past, or hankering after a future that is supposed to be more fulfilling than the present. All the while, the potential of the present moment is being aborted by our frantic and misguided efforts and our refusal or incapacity to let go into the 'here and now'.
Our busy minds are lost and forgetful, clinging onto the past and grasping towards the future, missing the only moment in which life can be found. With virtual reality and artificial intelligence threatening to take over, connecting with the vitality of flesh-and-blood bodymind intelligence in the 'here and now' seems more important than ever, doesn't it?
So maybe we have to revisit and re-appreciate the old idea of 'being here and now'?
For the purpose of self-development, the 'here and now' is the alpha and omega. No change has ever happened in the past, and no transformation will ever occur in the future, however desperately we are seeking. But how can our awareness milk the present moment for its sweet nectar, how can we fully surrender and extract from it everything it offers and has always offered? How can we attend to the full potential of the emergent process in the 'here and now'?
Outside of Buddhist teaching and mindfulness where attention to the present moment is one of the foundational pillars of practice, in the field of psychotherapy the significance of working in the 'here and now' has been declared and demonstrated most strongly and explicitly by Gestalt therapy. But as a therapeutic approach that is now more than 70 years old, Gestalt has its limitations. The more we understand what these limitations are, and by complementing these with models, ideas and techniques drawn from other therapeutic approaches, the more we are able to reinvigorate the practice of Gestalt therapy with its original promise. Many people saw that promise manifested in Fritz Perls' famous TV presentations, where he demonstrated his work in the 'here and now' with volunteers from the audience. Many modern Gestalt therapists are very critical of Perls, arguing that he set a bad example for what they consider the essence of Gestalt.
The paradoxical principle of change
Like few other therapeutic approaches, Gestalt is known for its focus on vibrancy, immediacy and experiential engagement. This is what many people are looking for in effective therapy - a method they can experience as having immediate, 'here and now' impact, that can be verified tangibly, subjectively. It does not require speculation or discipline or belief. As the client, you do not have to sign up to anything, you are not required to believe or take on board anything that's not immediately obvious from your own experience. That doesn't mean it's easy - on the contrary: the more that Gestalt invites us into the 'here and now', the more we discover a fundamental - and to some extent disturbing and frustrating - paradox, discovered and formulated by Gestalt therapists 50 years ago: change happens when we accept what is. This apparently simple and innocuous phrase is a rabbit hole, or maybe a wormhole, into the mysteries of the 'here and now'.
This online weekend workshop is an attempt to approach some of these existential mysteries through active, experiential exploration, by drawing on the wisdom and creativity of Gestalt as demonstrated by Fritz Perls, whilst maintaining also an awareness of the criticisms and dangers that have been brought against it. It is an opportunity for you to access the best that Gestalt has to offer in terms of making your 'here and now' experience the centrepoint of everything, and entering its transformative paradoxes. Will it make a profound difference to your life and change you? Yes, if you can accept what is, in the here and now!
Format of the weekend
This will be an online Zoom weekend, organised in Greece for Greek participants, but taking place in English with simultaneous Greek translation, so English-speaking participants from across the planet are invited. We can expect that participants will bring quite different levels of previous experience to this workshop as well as familiarity with different kinds of therapy - we will try to do justice to this and attempt to try and turn that problem into a productive feature of our work together.
Michael has experimented for quite a few years now with the online format of Zoom for shared group experience, in a way that maximises spontaneous and embodied engagement. Throughout the weekend, he will offer brief thoughts around some fundamental principles, giving some theoretical frame to our exploration so that we can more deeply attend to each other's experience. But most of the weekend is dedicated to experiential engagement through pair work, small group work and especially to individual demonstrations, reminiscent of Fritz Perls, when Michael will work with volunteers. Most participants find that - whether they volunteer or not - they can identify and have their own issues touched and addressed through somebody else's individual work that resonates deeply.
We want to be mindful of confidentiality, and commit to a shared undertaking that nothing from the workshop will be indiscreetly shared with others, other than your very own personal-professional responses to the workshop.
Some of the possible learning objectives:
- experiment with our subjective awareness of dropping into 'here and now' awareness
- notice how 'here and now' awareness fluctuates and oscillates, and how 'charge' rises and falls
- begin to recognise patterns of avoidance and distraction taking attention away from the 'here and now'
- become curious about how such patterns of avoidance are organised and what drives them
- understanding charge and vibrancy as a parallel processes between internal and external relationship
- recognise the importance of bodily sensations and breath for being anchored in the present moment
- appreciate some of the limiting traditional humanistic assumptions regarding the 'here and now'
- learn to apprehend the complex bodymind reality of the present moment, with its inherent conflicts
- learn to apprehend the parallel processes between the 'here and now' and the 'there and then'
- engage deeply with the paradoxical principle of change, and what we mean by "accepting what is"
- expand our conception of the role of the therapist beyond traditional Gestalt notions
- notice how the client's conflict becomes the therapist's conflict in the 'here and now'
- experiment with fully embracing the implications of the paradoxical principle of change for the therapist
- expanding our attention to the 'here and now' across all available channels of perception and communication, to include the whole field
- generating creative experiential experiments focusing attention on the 'here and now' at the edge of the window of tolerance
An ongoing, broad-spectrum integrative group
This semi-closed group has been running for several years now (since 2015), with new participants joining the 'pool' of members as places become available. Led by one of the most experienced integrative trainers in the UK, this group will provide an ideal relational container for your ongoing development as a therapist. By immersing yourself in a diverse group of colleagues from different schools and orientations, you will widen your perspective, deepen your practice, draw both inspiration and challenge from the co-created wide-ranging experiential work and have a reference point as well as resources and teaching to support your further development.
You can find a detailed description of the format and objectives of this group on the dedicated page.
Online Zoom Workshop for everybody interested the power of the breath
Sat & Sun, 24 & 25 May 2025, 15.00 – 21.00 EET
in English (with expert simultaneous Greek translation)
More Info & Booking: website: https://upliftingevent.com/
More info for participants from Greece: Dimitris Tzachanis - info@gestaltsynthesis.gr
More info for participants from UK, US and elsewhere: Michael Soth
About integral-relational Breathwork
Finding your own style within the spectrum of 21st-century psychotherapy
“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.”
Rumi
In this session I will invite you to explore the therapeutic space beyond notions of right or wrong, beyond ideas of best theory, correct technique, practice by the book or manual.
I will invite you to use all your faculties, all your knowledge, all your woundedness and sensitivity to get a flavour of your own therapeutic style, that is free to draw fluidly and integratively from the wealth of therapeutic knowledge and expertise humans have accumulated.
As C.G. Jung said: “There should only be one Jungian therapist – me.”
Everybody else - including you and me - we need to find our own style, rooted in our own relational complexity and embodied in our own history, wounds and limitations as well as gifts and potential. As we can only find this in the moment, rather than through thinking or theory only, this session will weave between experience and reflection, between skills practice and discussion, engaging you with your next step at your growing edge.
We may draw from the following themes what seems most relevant and urgent.
Creating an open, inviting therapeutic space
‘Nothing human is foreign to me.’
What gets in the way of full engagement?
What limits the client’s experience of the therapeutic space?
Phenomenological enquiry into the therapist’s internal process: how is the therapist behaving habitually in ways that are, for example, fixed, limited, restrained, unresponsive or overly-giving?
Focussing on the therapist’s ‘construction’ of the therapeutic space.
Creating an effective transformative therapeutic space
‘Allowing the client’s unconscious to construct me as an object.’
What limits a full and deeply transformative process?
Phenomenological enquiry into the therapist’s external effects: how are the therapist’s responses/interventions countertherapeutic?
The doctor-friend polarity
therapy as treatment (‘medical model’) versus therapy as collusive friendship
objectifying/pathologising versus colluding/avoidant
therapy as relationship
objectifying – differentiating – identifying – colluding
The client’s conflict: habitual mode versus emergency
‘something desperately has to happen’ – ‘nothing has to happen/nothing to be imposed’
the client’s character conflicts / the ego-Self axis
A broad-spectrum integration of approaches
The shattered and fragmented postmodern wholeness
Drawing on the gifts and wisdom of the whole field (fragmentation of the field reflects the fragmented modern psyche – the integration of the client’s psyche into wholeness requires the integration of the whole field)
The history of schisms and conflicts in the psychotherapeutic field and how it affects us now
integration and dis-integration
cherry-picking approaches versus full-spectrum integration
therapeutic approach cannot be grasped by theory and technique – underlying implicit relational stance
The therapist’s habitual, wounded, fixed position
Moving beyond a one-dimensional therapeutic position
The wounded healer position
The therapist’s habitual position – inheriting the wounds of our family ancestors, our therapeutic ancestors, or cultural ancestors …
The therapist’s shadow
The dangers of integration
Shifting from therapeutic approaches to relational modalities
Gomez, Stark, Clarkson, Michael’s Diamond model: what kind of therapeutic relatedness?
Gomez: humanistic ‘alongside’ stance versus psychodynamic ‘opposite’ stance
Stark: ‘one-person psychology’, ‘one-and-a-half-person psychology’, ‘two-person psychology’
Clarkson: working alliance – authentic – reparative – transference/countertransference - transpersonal
Michael’s Diamond model: include ‘medical model’
understanding identifications - projective identification – transference and countertransference as systemic bodymind processes
Transcending dualisms and binaries into paradox
the relational paradox: transcending treatment versus relationship dualism = paradox of enactment
I-it and I-I relating
the bodymind paradox: transcending mind-over-body versus body-over-mind dualism = embodiment/disembodiment paradox
the central paradox of therapy: the healing of the client’s wounding is inseparable from the enactment of wounding in and through therapy.
The fractal self: a chain of nested matrices of parallel process
integrative/integral
relational
embodied
systemic
paradoxical
The bodymind connection in working with psychosomatic and physical symptoms
A weekend workshop in Athens with Michael Soth
Even though counsellors and psychotherapists are traditionally expected to focus on emotional, mental and verbal communications, many clients invariably do bring their physical and psychosomatic symptoms into the session.
Through including body-oriented ways of working into the talking therapies, we can learn to work with many of these symptoms more directly, more deeply and more effectively (and recognise other situations where the hope of curing illness through psychology is an unreasonable idealisation).
This CPD workshop is designed to expand your understanding of the bodymind connection as well as offering a wide range of creative and body-oriented techniques to include in your practice.
With some illnesses - like hypertension, chest and heart problems, digestive illnesses, symptoms of the immune system - it is scientifically established that emotional stress contributes to their origin. With many other psychosomatic problems, like all kinds of pain, tinnitus, insomnia, chronic fatigue and many other unexplained symptoms, it is known that the intensity of the suffering can be ameliorated through psychological therapy that addresses the regulation and expression of emotion and de-stresses the mind.
Stress is the catchall phrase that supposedly explains the influence of our psychological body-emotion-mind state on illness. However, what is less well understood, is how our bodymind does not just respond to stresses in our current situation and lifestyle, but carries accumulated stress from the past, reaching all the way back to childhood. A holistic and bio-social-psychological understanding of stress needs to include lifelong patterns of the bodymind including developmental injury and trauma (what Wilhelm Reich originally called character structures).
Sometimes clients bring psychosomatic illness as a presenting issue to the therapy, sometimes these symptoms actually evolve in direct response to the unfolding therapeutic process, and the therapist gets implicated in them, e.g. “After last session I had a headache for three days!”
Direct links to body sensations and symptoms as well as body image come up as part of our work in sessions every day, in so many ways: tangible pains, tensions, trembling and shaking, breathing difficulties (hyperventilation, asthma), the physical side of unbearable feelings like panic, rage, dread or terror. There are obvious somatic aspects to presenting issues such as eating disorders or addictions. And then there are the psychological implications of actual, sometimes terminal, illnesses and psychosomatic symptoms and dis-ease.
How do we work with these issues and symptoms in psychotherapy? What ways are available to us for including the client’s ‘felt sense’, their embodied self states, their body awareness and sensations, their physiological experience in the interaction ?
This workshop will give you a framework for thinking about the role of the body as it is relevant in your own style of therapeutic work, based upon the different ways in which clients as well as therapists relate to ‘the symptom’. Throughout the workshop, we will use roleplay of actual issues and dilemmas brought up by your clients. We will also identify and practice ways in which you can explore the emotional function and 'meaning' of your client's physical symptom or illness.
Drawing on a wide range of humanistic and psychoanalytic approaches (including Body Psychotherapy, Process-oriented Psychology, various schools of psychoanalysis and Jungian perspectives) as well as the holistic paradigm underpinning most complementary therapies, we will weave together an interdisciplinary bodymind approach which is applicable within the therapeutic relationship as we know it in counselling and psychotherapy.
Michael has been working with the psychological and bodymind connection of illness and psychosomatic symptoms for many years. In the 1990s he initiated a project called 'Soul in Illness', offering an integrative psychotherapeutic perspective, drawing on the wisdom which the different therapeutic approaches have accumulated regarding illness, both in terms of theoretical understanding and practical ways of working. He has run CPD workshops for therapists on ‘Working with Illness’ many times, and has developed a relational and embodied way of engaging with the client’s bodymind. In 2005 he presented for the first time his model of ‘8 ways of relating to the symptom’, which addresses the client’s own relationship to their symptom, as well as giving an overview of the different stances taken by the therapist in the various therapeutic approaches that correspond to each of the ways of relating to the symptom. These eight ways of relating to the symptom, including the corresponding theoretical understandings as well as methods and techniques for intervention, will form the underlying framework for this workshop.
Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool
And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled
Oh, man is opposed to fair play
He wants it all and he wants it his way.Bob Dylan: License To Kill
Narcissism has a reputation for being notoriously difficult to engage with in therapy, for a variety of good reasons, not least because the very idea of ‘needing’ therapy is a humiliating insult to the grandiose self. As one of the key modern ‘disturbances of the self’, narcissism has replaced Victorian repression as the psychological disease of the age, which means that the original theories of our discipline from 100 years ago no longer quite apply. As a dominant collective issue, as exhibited by the celebrity culture all over the world and all over the media, the term ‘narcissism’ has entered pop psychology and lost all precision and meaning. In order to be clinically useful, we need to have a clear, circumscribed definition of narcissism, and its origins and manifestations.
Beyond commonplace over-simplifications, the various therapeutic traditions have widely divergent ideas and theories about narcissism, leading to quite contradictory recommendations for therapists. More than many other issues, therefore, narcissism requires an integrative stance, that can draw insights and understanding from the various approaches and combine them, to provide a comprehensive understanding and therapeutic response.
Because the narcissist tries to approximate an image of perfection (attempting to manifest a grandiose self), this leads to a chameleon-like disconnection from the body, and an objectifying, ‘perfecting’ treatment of it. For many celebrities, the body becomes an advertisement of the False Self, treated like one more fashion accessory. More than many other issues, therefore, narcissism calls for an embodied therapy, reconnecting the person to pleasurable, ordinary human reality, rather than pursuing the delusions of a disembodied virtual self.
Because the narcissist was emotionally ‘used’ by their parent(s), their individuality was never fully seen and mirrored. Therefore, in the moment where we apply a generic diagnostic label and put the narcissist into the same category with many others, we are re-inflicting a lack of individual mirroring. More than any other issue, narcissism reveals some of the shadow aspects and weaknesses of our discipline. In order to make therapy possible, we cannot afford to rely on a reasonable and supposedly realistic ego-ego alliance: we need a working alliance both with the wounded, insignificant self as well as the inflated grandiose self.
This course will provide condensed understanding extracted from the various therapeutic approaches, specifically drawing from and integrating the various psychoanalytic, the humanistic-embodied and the Jungian traditions. We will combine the theoretical input with practical, experiential work, based upon vignettes and case illustrations volunteered by participants, to explore how these ideas may be applied in practice.
We will be drawing on the following literature:
- Jacoby, Mario (2013, Reprint edition) Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut. Routledge.
- Johnson, S. M. (1987) Humanizing the Narcissistic Style. W.W. Norton.
- Johnson, S. M. (1994) Character Styles. W.W. Norton.
- Kohut, H. (2009) The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders.
- Kohut, H. (2009) The Restoration of the Self.
- Kernberg, O. (1984) Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies. Yale University Press.
- Kernberg, O. (1996) Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Jason Aronson.
- Otto Kernberg, On Narcissism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyP92WLLqIU ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeVMtZns5Pw
- Lowen, A. (2004) Narcissism: Denial of the True Self. Touchstone.
- Schwartz-Salant, N. (1982) Narcissism and Character Transformation. Inner City Books.
- Shaw, D. (2013) Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. Routledge.
- Twenge, J.M. & Campbell, W.K. (2010) The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Free Press.